>> Jacqueline Bouchier: My name is Jacqueline Bouchier and I'm the chief online safety officer
here at Microsoft. I'd like to welcome you all on behalf of the MSR Visiting Speaker Series. Just
a brief introduction about Katie Davis. She is an assistant professor at the University of
Washington Information School where she studies the role of digital media in adolescents
academic, social and moral lives. She also serves as an advisory board member for MTV’s
digital abuse campaign, A Thin Line. She holds two masters degrees and a doctorate in human
development and education from the Harvard Graduate School of Education. Prior to joining
the University of Washington I School, Katie worked with Doctor Howard Gardner and
colleagues at Harvard's Private 0 where she was a member of the good play project and the
developing minds and digital media project research teams. My colleagues and I in trustworthy
computing met with Katie a few months ago when she came to campus to talk to us about
online bullying and other online safety topics. We learned at the time that Katie is the only
professor in the U.S. who has a program dedicated to digital youth. Personally I found The App
Generation to be really insightful and I loved what I would call the connecting generations
theme that pervades the book. Katie's co-author, if you will, is the older adult and Katie is his
generational junior and then there's a time for Katie’s sister to be interviewed as well who is a
teen at the time of the writing of the book. And then there's even a little surprised at the end
where yet another generation is brought into the dialogue. Without further ado, Katie Davis.
[applause]
>> Katie Davis: Thank you. Hi. Good afternoon and thank you so much for choosing me over
the beautiful sun outside, at least for the time being. This book represents a synthesis of
research that I've been conducting with Howard Gardner and my colleagues since 2007 at the
Harvard graduate school of education. For the last several years Howard and I have been
researching the role that digital media technologies play in various aspects of young people's
lives. Really, the seeds for the book were planted for me several years before that in my fourth
grade classroom. I was a teacher, a fourth-grade teacher in the early to mid-2000s and during
that time technology was becoming increasingly central to young people's lives both inside and
outside of school. At that time my sister Molly who figures prominently in the book was eight
years old and I could just tell that she was growing up in a much different way than I was. From
my view as a teacher and a considerably older sister, it was clear to me that this trend was only
going to continue, and it was only going to get bigger and that there were all sorts of really
exciting and important implications involved with respect to how young people learn and how
they communicate with other people and really how they form a sense of who they are in the
world. I was really fortunate when I went to Harvard as a doctoral student, Howard was just
beginning to start to ask similar questions. We started off particularly exploring the moral and
ethical dimensions of what kids were doing online, so those tricky, thorny situations that they
encounter related to their privacy and ownership and authorship and participation in different
communities. Then we started to broaden our focus and we started to explore other aspects of
youth development such as their identity development, their social development and also their
creative expression. As Jacqueline mentioned, we created a project called The Developing
Minds and Digital Media Project. It really sought to pose a very big question: How are today's
young people different from young people who grew up in a pre-digital era? We began to
interview adults who had worked with kids for at least two decades and we just asked them
what have you noticed over the time that you have been teaching. We also looked at what
young people had been producing creatively over that 20 year period and we talked to young
people. We interviewed and surveyed over 2000 young people in the U.S. During the course of
our research, we came to an important realization. Whereas earlier generations have typically
been defined by political or economic events, if we think about the world wars, the Great
Depression, the civil rights movement, this generation of young people is defined more and
actually defines itself more by the technologies that they use. What was most telling was their
desire to have everything very quickly, very efficiently, very well packaged, no mess, no fuss.
When we started the research in 2007, apps weren't really part of the cultural zeitgeist like they
are now. But as iPhone was introduced and the slogan, there's an app for that, became a
common saying, we started to realize that actually, apps served as a fitting metaphor for what
we were observing in our research. In the book and in my talk today I'll be kind of going in and
out from speaking about apps sort of literally, and then also speaking about them
metaphorically in terms of our relationship to technology. That's why we called the book The
App Generation. Really, it's because it served as a fitting metaphor for what we were seeing.
Let's unpack that a little bit. Let's consider the features of an app. Think about what, as we've
come to know it today, what an app is. Basically, it's a software application commonly stored
on your phone or your tablet. I'm sure most of you are holding a phone right now with a bunch
of apps, and it allows you to perform a very discrete task, whether it's searching for a nearby
coffee shop, sharing pictures on Instagram or looking up the name of that actor in a TV show
that you're watching. Apps let you do all of these things very quickly and on-demand. You
could think of them as shortcuts. They take you straight to what you are looking for. There's
no need to perform a web search. Apps are plentiful and they span a wide variety of
categories. In Apple Store alone, they have over a million apps available for downloads in all
sorts of categories like lifestyle and games and finance and music and productivity. I
understand there may not be quite as many apps available in the Windows Store, but there's
still a variety. Apps are plentiful, but they're not infinite and importantly, the things that you
can do with any given app are going to be highly constrained by the design and coding decisions
that were made by the app developer. Lastly, one of the key signifiers of an app is that visual
icon that's associated with it. Consider the Facebook F or the Twitter bird or the Amazon
shopping cart. All of these logos are very highly provocative and they illustrate the fact that
apps are fundamentally tied up in their external packaging and visual representation. In the
book we argue that young people growing up today are not just immersed in apps, so speaking
metaphorically here, it's almost as if they've come to see the world as a collection of apps.
Their lives is a string of ordered apps. This is perhaps not surprising when there are apps and
technology generally for just about any activity that you can think of, setting personal goals,
communicating with other people, creating art. And in the book we introduce the idea of an
app mentality that many of today's young people seem to exhibit. The app mentality suggests
that whatever human beings might desire or might question, should be answered and provided
by apps. If the wanted app doesn't exist, well then, one should be devised right away. If no app
can be imagined or created to fulfill that desire, well maybe that desire didn't matter to begin
with or maybe it shouldn't matter. The big question is is this app mentality good or is it bad? A
world permeated by apps is in many ways a terrific one. I love my apps. I don't know about
you, and I use them to do a ton of things, to make plans with friends, to find my way around to
an unfamiliar location, to listen to music, to wake me up in the morning, to put me to bed at
night. Apps are great if they can take care of these ordinary things and free us up to do more
important matters. They are a great way to keep us connected to our friends and our family.
They are even a great way to introduce us to new experiences. It's our contention that when
apps are used in this way as entry points or as jumping off points into new experiences, they
are app enabling, but there's a less optimistic view of apps. There's a danger that we become
overly dependent on apps for the answers for social connection, for a sense of ourselves.
There's a danger that we look to apps before we look inside of ourselves. If this happens, if we
start to see more of our apps than ourselves in our experiences and our actions and our selfexpressions, it's our argument that we have become app depended. In our research with our
colleagues, Howard and I have considered this tension between app enabling on the one hand
and app dependence on the other within three spheres of experience that are particularly
salient for young people. That's their sense of personal identity, their intimate relationships to
other people and also the way they exercise their creative and imaginative powers. We call
these the three I’s of identity, intimacy and imagination and they really form the focus of our
book. To explore how today's app generation experiences each of these three I’s, we collected
data as I mentioned earlier from a wide variety of sources. We started with in-depth interviews
of veteran teachers. We then conducted seven focus groups with educators who had been
teaching both inside of schools and outside of schools as well as in other areas. We interviewed
therapists and religious leaders and my personal favorite focus group was with camp directors,
because at the end there was one of the camp directors who took out his banjo and led us in
song and that was really fun. We also looked at what young people had been producing over
the last 20 years from 1990 to 2011. We looked at both their visual art and their creative
writing and then we talked to kids. We talked to over 2000 young people. In the book we kind
of triangulate all of this research that we conducted as well as research from other scholars to
explore how the app mentality manifests in each of the three areas of identity, intimacy and
imagination. Let's take a look at the first I, identity. As I've noted, apps are very much tied up
in their external representation, that visual icon that evokes a particular brand. It appears that
the identities of today's young people are increasingly externally packaged. That is, they're
developed and put forth so that they convey a certain desirable image of themselves to a
particular audience and it may not be adults. That audience may be real or imagined. This
identity is not unlike the branded icon of an app. And apps in the social year platforms that
apps give rise to and provide access to seem to encourage this emphasis on personal packaging
and branding. If you think about the emergence in recent years of constant status updates and
selfies and profile likes, these are all kind of symptoms of this trend towards the packaged self.
One effect of this packaging, the emphasis of performing to an external audience, is that focus
on the inner life, that internal sense of self may be minimized somewhat, including reflection on
one's values and goals and dreams. Of course, a really big part of forming one's identity is
doing so in a social context, but there's also a part of forming one's identity that requires an
inner and quiet reflection on what matters to you. On a more distinctly positive note, today's
youth have opportunities to explore a wider variety of identities in a vast array of communities
that they have access to online, so whether those communities are really into music or fan
culture, civic engagement or gaming. And such identity exploration is really an important part
of youth development, so in many ways this is a great opportunity. We saw a lot of that in our
research. It also, as well, it appears that youth are more accepting and welcoming of a wider
variety of identities than other people whether related to race or sexual orientation or personal
interests. It seems reasonable to suspect that the internet and social media platforms have
played an important role here, so helping to connect use to people across geographic and
cultural boundaries, in the process expanding their knowledge and understanding of people
who are different from them. With respect to intimacy, we found that youth are certainly
always connected both to their friends and their parents. First let's consider parents. You don't
often think of parents and teens, they're always hanging out, but really we find in our research
that today's youth are connected to a greater degree and also for a longer time to their
parents. In many ways this is a really positive thing. It's a positive development. Parents and
their children seem to be closer than ever and that's great. But the question is, how much
connection is too much, especially during adolescence and then in the college years during
emerging adulthood, when an important developmental task, at least in Western societies is to
gain a sense of autonomy and identity that is distinct from one's parents. Consider one of the
studies we came across in our research done by researchers out of Middlebury College and they
found that college kids are on average in contact with their parents over 13 times per week. I
don't know about you, but when I was in college I may be called home once a week, but that
was about it. But, you know, this 13 times a week is quite extraordinary, I think, and it's very,
you know, very small, quick intro communications, usually text or phone. Just checking in
about their day, asking for advice about what course they should take or things like that, what
they should wear for breakfast. In our own research we were struck by this one anecdote in
the camp director focus group where one of the camp directors told us while the other camp
directors were nodding in recognition, that parents often send their children to camp with two
cell phones, one to turn over to camp personnel at the start of camp and the other one to hide
so that they can communicate with their parents. Again, I went to camp a couple of times and
there was no connection at all to my parents. With respect to friends, digital media allow youth
to stay in constant communication with their friends, but constant communication doesn't
always translate into deep communication. And it's hard. It's hard to stay deeply connected
with any one person when you're trying to keep up with hundreds or even thousands of friends
and followers across multiple social media platforms while at the same time listening to music
and doing your homework and maybe watching a TV show on Netflix or Hulu. Related to this,
we witnessed a certain reluctance in young people to show vulnerability in their relationships.
After all, it's far easier to share personal feelings at arm’s length and through a screen rather
than by looking at someone and confronting them face-to-face. Consider the connection to
apps here. As I've noted, apps are ultimately shortcuts and when it comes to relationships
shortcuts can make interacting with others very quick, very easy and also less risky because,
again, you don't have to confront someone and if the conversation gets a little too personal for
a little too uncomfortable, you can just close out the app and you're done. If these shortcuts
are used in moderation and to augment rather than replace existing relationships, there's a lot
of ways where they can support meaningful relationships and we saw a lot of evidence of
young people using technology to really support and promote and develop their social
relationships. But if they're used to replace rather than augment or if they start to get in the
way of sustained deep communication, then apps may facilitate superficial ties and lead to
relationships that are more transactional than transformational. Consider this dating app,
Tinder. Who here is familiar with this app? Okay, many of you, okay, much more than at the
Seattle Town hall [laughter]. Basically, Tinder, for the uninitiated, is basically a stripped down
dating app and it just shows you pictures and very basic facts about the people who are in your
immediate area. Basically what you do is, as this picture kind of shows is you swipe through the
pictures and if you find someone attractive, then you swipe right. If you don't, too bad for
them, you swipe left. And then if two people both swipe right then there's a match and who
knows what will go on after that. Of course, there's nothing to say that this app could lead to a
meaningful in person relationship like other dating apps have, but anecdotal evidence that I've
heard from young people suggests that many of them are using it primarily as a way to facilitate
casual hookups, in other words, purely transactional one-time interactions. Apparently, it was
actually quite popular among American athletes this year in the Olympic Village. [laughter].
Lastly, imagination, now a sizable portion of the app ecology is devoted to supporting artistic
productions. There are apps for just about any genre you can imagine to create something like
painting, drawing, video editing, filmmaking, music composition, pretty much anything you can
think of. Digital media really have opened up new avenues for youth to express themselves
creatively, and importantly, these avenues are very quick. They're easy and they're cheap,
cheaper than they ever have been. Yet, it's important to consider the fact that the app
developers as I said before, they are going to constrain the range of actions you can do with any
given artistic app. That's going to constrain the artistic expression in specific ways. For
instance, if you're using a painting app, your color palette is going to be limited to the hues that
the designer programmed into the app. If you're using a music composition app, your tonal
range is similarly going to be limited. Of course, enterprising and sophisticated users can create
their own workarounds and they can break free from the constraints of the underlying code,
but realistically most people are going to probably work within the parameters of the original
app. It may be true that creativity loves constraints, still, it's worth asking how much constraint
is too much. And how do these digital boundaries affect the creative process? Which is it? I
kind of offered two scenarios. Is technology supporting, enhancing young people's creativity or
is it undermining their creativity? We actually wanted to investigate that question by looking
directly at what young people had been producing creatively over the course of the last 20
years and we looked in two particular domains, visual art and creative writing. Here I'll go into
just a little bit more detail about our methods and some of our key findings. We do our visual
art sample from a team literary and art magazine that has been published since 1989 and is still
being published, several editions every year. We developed a detailed coding scheme with 18
separate codes and to help us develop this coding scheme we had two master students at
Harvard in the arts in education program who had fine arts degrees, so they really knew about
this domain and the appropriate codes to create. In total we coded over 350 works of art, half
from the early 1990s and then half from the more recent years in 2010 and 2011. Here's just a
very small sample of some of the art that we got to look at and it was a lot of fun, this part of
the research just seeing all of the different artwork that kids had created over the last 20 years.
Our coding scheme, I'm not going to go through all the codes at all, just share with you some of
the key findings from the codes that are highlighted in orange. Let's start with background.
One of the things, basically one of the things we did was we took each component of the
artistic process, so we looked at and we zoomed in and analyzed any changes. First when we
were looking at background, we looked at uncategorized pieces to see how fully rendered was
the background. Was the figure just on a blank background or was there something going on in
the background? And what we found was in the earlier pieces in the early 1990s, most of them
tended to be on blank or just partially rendered backgrounds. Whereas, you can see in the late
pieces, this is just one example, the background tended to be more filled out and just more
going on generally. We looked at compositions, so we looked at how the figures were
positioned in the visual plane. Were they straight on, centered? Were they off centered, things
like that? What we found was in the earlier pieces, they tended more or less to be centered,
whereas, the more recent pieces tended to be slightly off center and displayed stylized
cropping. Lastly, we looked at medium and we had a bunch of different subcodes for this.
There's a lot of different media and we generally categorized them into two big categories, the
more traditional media like pen and ink and drawing and painting, and then the more
nontraditional media such as collage or digital art or found objects. What we found was,
perhaps not surprisingly, there was more nontraditional media used anymore recent pieces,
but there was a particular decline in the use of pen and ink. I would say, I think over 50percent
of the earlier pieces tended to be pen and ink, where the more recent pieces very few were.
There was much more mixed-media, found objects and collage. Creative writing, what did we
find here? When we wanted to look at creative writing we looked at two data sets we
compiled. One of the hard things about this research was just finding complete data sets over
the course of the last 20 years. We kind of had to look all across the country for that. But we
did, we were able to find bodies of work from middle school kids and high school kids from the
early 1990s through present-day. Again, we had a very extensive coding scheme and I won't go
through it, just touch on some key findings from the orange highlighted codes. Again here, our
coding scheme was developed based on conventions in writing. We were looking both at the
structure of the writing and also the content because we were interested to see if themes of
media, for instance, came up in their writing. Again, I'll share with you some key findings. First,
one of our big codes was coding for genre. Were they writing a historical fiction piece? Where
they writing an epistle or a fantasy piece or an absurdist piece? We categorized each story
according to their genre. What we found is in the earlier pieces, they tended to be a little bit
out there and the earlier pieces -- this is from the early 1990s, they tended to have magical
elements, surrealist elements, absurdist themes. Whereas the more recent pieces tended to
kind of stick close to home. They were more mundane, daily experience type themes. Just to
give you a flavor of the earlier 1990s pieces, one of the stories was very vivid for me when I
read it was just a short kind of vignette of the protagonist who went to see his therapist who
happened to be a crab. They had a very strange conversation and at the end of it the
protagonist grabbed his crab therapist with a pair of tongs and took him home to boil him. So
very kind of just out there, you know, weird and we didn't see that type of thing in the more
recent pieces. Another story I remember there's a city and one day everybody in the city wakes
up and there's this huge mirrored dome over the city that's exposing the corruption and the
crime of the city. So it's just these kind of strange, you know, our initial reaction was gosh.
These earlier pieces were just a little weird and out there and quirky, whereas the more recent
pieces were kind of, they kind of felt more like, you know, this is what I did today type of thing.
We also looked at structures, so how they progressed in time, these stories, and the more
recent pieces were, tended kind of related to the genre, they tended to follow a more
chronological order. So this happened and then this happened and then this happened. The
earlier, early 1990 pieces, they tended to jump around all over the place in time, so present,
past, future and some of them didn't have any sort of linear narrative at all. It was just kind of a
sketch of something. We also looked at voice because voice is something that you can look at
to see how traditional or conventional a piece is. The earlier pieces tended to be more in the
first and second person voice, whereas the more recent pieces were in the third person and
that tends to be more conventional. Then we also looked at language because there's a lot of
talk about, these days about netspeak and is that affecting how kids are writing and expressing
themselves, and we did find a difference in how young people use words and language from
the early 1990s to the more recent times, but we didn't find any examples of netspeak, but it
was definitely more informal language in the more recent pieces and it was, you know, like
more slang and cursing and even made up words. The bottom line as Marshall McLuhan would
say, the medium really does matter with respect to how creativity is changing young people
over the last 20 years. With respect to visual art, we actually see increasing complexity and less
conventionality and in the creative writing it's kind of an opposite trend, almost. We see less
experimentation and almost a greater adherence to the everyday and the mundane. In short,
we see more graphic and less literary imagination in our sample of teens. If we think about this
in terms of the role of digital media, think about and consider art in particular, there's probably
two things we think are going on. Of course, we can't draw any direct connection, but if you
think about the first big thing that digital media provided, it's just new tools for production.
And as I said before, the tools are easy to come by. They're cheap and they just open up a
really wide range of avenues for creative expression, so that's probably something to do with
what's going on with the visual art. The other thing that we see is that the internet has just
expanded our access to sources of inspiration from other people and we can see what other
people have created, people like us and people, you know, different from us, and get
inspiration, draw inspiration from them. With respect to writing, that's a little bit more
complicated. It's hard to tell. And there's a lot of talk about maybe our kids are reading less or
are writing less and it's hard to tell, I think, if they are actually writing less. But I think it's
probably safe to say that the type of writing that many of them are doing online is often, is
different, and it's often very quick; it's very fleeting. It's casual and it's very much tied to the
everyday mundane. It's also worth noting and of course I would be remiss not to say this as an
educator having done this research in an education school, that there is a really big trend that's
also taken place over the last 20 years in our schools and that's the trend towards an increased
focus on standardized testing and really teaching to the tests and teaching kids to craft that
perfect five paragraph essay. We think that that's probably also has got something to do with
the changes that we have seen in creative writing. I just want to say one more thing about
creativity in a digital era. Creativity scholars they often talk about, make a distinction between
big C creativity and little c creativity. The former consists of the truly groundbreaking works of
art. Those are original works which fundamentally change a domain forever. If you think about
Stravinsky's Rite of Spring or Picasso's Les Demoiselles d’Avignon or Martha Graham's frontier,
all of these pieces fundamentally changed the domains of music and art and dance. In contrast,
little c creativity is really found in the realm of everyday, so how we approach daily problem
solving, how we adapt to the changes that come our way on a daily basis. Through the course
of our investigations we started to think that perhaps digital media give rise to and possibly
allow more people to engage in a middle c creativity that is definitely more interesting and
impressive than little c creativity, but due to the built-in software constraints and perhaps
obstacles to deep engagement because of multitasking decidedly less groundbreaking than big
C creativity. To be sure, there's a place for all three kinds of creativity in any society, but the
types of disruptive, groundbreaking innovations that move society forward rely particularly on
big C creativity. Back to apps. We are often asked when we give talks to identify apps that are
enabling and apps that are dependent, that promote dependence. The answer really is that
any app can be used in more or less of a dependent or an enabling way. However, a lot of apps
that we have come across, particularly in the area of education, tend to lean towards app
dependence. If you consider this example, there's this app doodle buddy. Are some people
familiar with it or maybe you have used it? A few of you, I see. It's basically a drawing app and
this is, I think, a good example of how one app can actually lean towards app enabling or app
dependence. It can go either way depending on the setting. Let's look first at the app enabling
scenario. Here you go. You open up your doodle buddy and you just start with a blank canvas
and you choose the colors that you want to use or choose what implement you want to use to
apply them. You are constrained, somewhat, in those choices, but then you just start drawing
and you apply it. And it may not be a work of art but it is yours and it's been done in an openended way. In that very same app, there is another way to use it that tilts more towards app
dependence. Same app, but in a different setting you have prefab backgrounds and prefab
figures and you just kind of select the background you want, you plop it onto your canvas.
Similarly, you choose your figures and you just kind of plop it on. Eventually, you've kind of got
a paint by numbers picture. What can we do as educators, as parents as designers of apps to
tilt that balance toward using apps in an enabling way and more broadly speaking to encourage
youth to live their lives in an app enabling way and not give up their agency to their individual
devices? So we suggest that the first thing is we need to model app enablement in ourselves.
We need to model moderation in our technologies. Adults are powerful models for kids.
They're watching us. They're looking at how we are tied to our phones and our tablets in our
laptops. It's important that we show them that there's a time to put these devices away and be
fully present. It's also important to provide youth with app enabled experiences that
emphasize open-ended exploration and personal initiative over the more structured top-down
constrained activities. This is very much in a constructivists mindset of education. This applies,
by the way, both online and to off-line experiences. It's also important to teach computational
skills so that kids are able to modify existing apps and create their own apps so they are in
charge of their technology. This is something, I'm at the information school at the University of
Washington and this is really a focus of ours in the informatics program is helping young people
to become designers and programmers of their own apps. And then finally, designers have a
responsibility to at least consider in the design process whether their apps lean toward app
enablement or app dependence. Of course, you never know exactly how your design is going
to be used and you don't fully have control over that, but we would at least hope that you think
about this distinction between enablement and dependence during the design process and
attempt to design so that users are encouraged to use their apps in more of an open ended way
and as non-constrained as possible. To give you a bit of a sense of what a big impact educators
and parents can have on kids’ dispositions towards either app dependence or app enablement,
consider this study that we came across during the course of our research for the book. It was
conducted by a psychologist named Liz Bonawitz and it's actually nothing to do with apps and
nothing even to do with technology, but I think you really does show very powerfully the
difference between teaching for app enablement versus teaching for app dependence. In this
experiment, very simple, they, probably the hardest part of it was creating this contraption, but
young children are brought into the lab and they're presented with a very intricate, unfamiliar
toy to them. And there are all sorts of things that you can do. You can squeak it. There's a
light. There's music. There's a mirror. There's all sorts of stuff that you could do with this toy.
In one condition half of the kids are randomly assigned to a condition where the adult
researcher comes in and very carefully demonstrates exactly how the child should use this toy,
how it works. And the other condition, the other half of the kids, again the adult comes in and
starts to show the child how it's supposed to be used, but then they are called away for some
reason. They leave the kid on their own to explore the toy and figure out how it works for
themselves. What they found was that when the children were given free rein to explore on
their own, they engaged for a longer time with the toy and they also came up with a broader
range of ways to use the toy. In that open ended scenario, their play was actually of longer
duration and it was more interesting. It was more generative. But why does this even matter?
Apps are fun. They're convenient and they make life better and I don't want to get rid of mine,
so why should we even bother thinking about this app enablement versus app dependence and
teaching towards the former? I'd like you to consider this quote by the philosopher Alfred
North Whitehead that we and the book with. He says that civilization advances by extending
the number of important operations which we can perform without thinking about them. On
the face of it this sounds pretty great and there are plenty of examples of apps that take care of
mundane tasks that we don't even have to think about them. Laundry and grocery shopping
and other daily chores, hailing a cab, I use pretty much all of these things and ostensibly taking
care of these mundane things is supposed to free us up to engage in more meaningful and
fulfilling experiences, but the question is, and the question we should ask ourselves is where
does this outsourcing end. Consider the movie Her. Have you, who here has seen the movie?
Okay. It looks like about half of the people here. Don't worry, I won't give anything away. Just
the basic premise and probably even if you haven't seen it, many of you are probably aware, it's
about this main character Theodore and it's basically a love story between him and his
operating system. He kind of falls in love with his operating system who is intelligent. And you
can't really blame him because her voice is narrated by Scarlett Johansson. [laughter]. This is a
love story, but in a bigger sense this movie is about much more than a love story with a
machine. It's about our relationship to technology and how that's affecting our existence in the
world. I want to just relate to you to a scene that really sticks with me and it actually has
nothing to do with the love story and it doesn't give anything away. It actually happens right at
the start of the movie and we see Theodore sitting at his desk in his cubicle where he works.
He works at a place called beautifulhandwrittenletters.com and the camera starts to pan out
from where he is sitting and we start to see and we start to overhear the other workers and
they are dictating surrogate letters on behalf of grandchildren thinking their grandparents for
the birthday present, on behalf of spouses wishing each other happy anniversary and it just
really struck me. I wonder, is this where we're heading? How much of ourselves and our
relationships are we willing to outsource? Are we prepared to outsource childrearing to apps
and technology? Are we already doing it? Just consider that I did not make this up. There is
[laughter] actually a product that is being sold called an appivity seat. You just plug in your
tablet and the baby is entertained for hours, I guess. We end the book on a very optimistic
note with a conversation between Howard and his then six-year-old grandson Oscar. This really
gives us hope that perhaps members of the app generation will find their way towards app
enablement. I just read from the very final part of this conversation. As the book was just
about finished, Howard had the opportunity to talk with his grandson, Oscar, about his
experiences with digital media. Except for Howard's checking with Oscar’s parents beforehand,
Oscar was not prepared or prompted in any way for the chat. He allowed Howard to record the
conversation and actually when the interview was concluded, he showed Howard how to shut
off the recording function on his iPhone. Not surprisingly, as a child in 2005 Oscar has always
been surrounded by digital media. He's completely conversant and comfortable with the
terminology and jargon. Howard asked him what would happen if Opa took away his iPhone.
Oscar says, "I would not be sad. I still have a computer." [laughter]. And Howard says "what
do you do on it?" Oscar answers, "search on toys, go to.com to do something like hero
factory.com, little things. I can write a little code into the line so I can play some sort of game."
And Howard was a bit taken aback at Oscar’s ease with terminology, like.com and activities like
write a little code. Howard asked him if he ever Googled anything. The following exchange
ensued. Oscar said, "I Google everything, Amazon, like anything I need to go to Google or write
it down." Howard says "you sound a bit exasperated." Oscar says "kind of but I'm not sure I
know what exasperated means." [laughter]. Howard moved next to what one does and what
one does not do with computers. Here Oscar made it very clear distinction. Howard asked, he
said "I grew up without computers. What do you think that was like?" Oscar says, "People
would do all chores and more chores and more chores and no fun." Howard says, "No fun?"
Oscar, "a little bit but not much fun." Howard says, "Do you use computers for school and
study?" Oscar says, "I don't really do those things." I mean he's only six, after all. "I just use
my computers for fun." Howard asks, "How do your mom and dad use computers?" Oscar, "for
only one thing, work. My mom downloads things that she has to do like does work about food
in my school." His mother was doing graduate work at the time in food science. So it appears,
then, that Oscar makes a rather sharp division. Kids, computers fun versus adults, no computer
no fun, or adults, computers work. But were computers merely a source of pleasure and
amusement? So Howard decided to push Oscar a bit on what digital media did and did not
mean to him and what they enabled or prevented. So this conversation proved most
illuminating with respect to, particularly to how Oscar sees the world, in other words his digital
world of you. Howard asks, "How do you feel when your parents say put it away?" Oscar said,
"I feel a little blue, a little blue," he said in a slightly plaintive tone. Howard asks, "How would
you feel if your parents took all of your computers and phones away for a few weeks?" Oscar
says "I do feel a little blue, but I could actually have a little more freedom, play with my toys,
play with Aggie," his eight-month-old sister, "go to places with mom and dad." Howard says,
"What do you mean by freedom?" Oscar, "mostly people have technology." His word, no
prompting from his grandfather. "They are watching every game and it makes a boring sound
and they do it all day and don't do anything else, but just watch TV, so without technology you
can play with toys and things like that." Now Oscar at the age of six is certainly not a student of
digital media, nor has he read about utopias and dystopias, yet, at age 6 he already senses that
one can become a prisoner of the new technologies and that a world beyond them is beckoning
to be explored if there were just time and space to do so. He has figured out that there is virtue
and even reward in figuring out things for yourself on your own time and in your own way. And
I will conclude there. Thank you. [applause] Yes?
>>: So when you look at creativity imagination in your target how teens possibly changed from
the ‘90s to the current day, but you could also look at the subtext for how those media have
been changing, how the established people in that media have adapted, right? They have
adapted the past two decades. Were the teens merely reflecting what they are seeing the
established media doing or is it really technology that's striking up change in their patterns?
>> Katie Davis: We cannot say that these changes have been or have not been caused by
technology. We can do our best to just look at the changes and then look at what's been
changing in society at the same time. That's why actually in the book we talk quite extensively
about other societal changes and really an important one, I think, is just the way kids are being
taught in schools and that has really changed a lot over the last 20 years. I think it's had an
effect. We have spoken with a lot of teachers that have said they feel constrained in the way
that they teach, but with respect to, so I think that with the writing, I suspect that what we're
seeing is really probably more a reflection of the education system and how that has changed.
Though I think the change in the language probably has to do with just conventions of discourse
online. With respect to the visual art, I think we've had a lot of conversations about what is
this, because we see that the more recent pieces are more interesting, frankly. They're more
complex. They're less conventional, so what accounts for that change? Is it, are they being
taught in a different way? Is it the digital tools that give them the ability to create in that new
way? Or, some of us on our research team have suggested that perhaps it could actually be
that they are being exposed to other’s creations and they're actually just mimicking what
they're seeing online. It's hard to know. Without a controlled experiment and you can't really
do a controlled experiment under these conditions, but I do think that the elements, I didn't
mention it originally, but I do think the elements of being affected by what you're seeing other
people produce probably has a role. I think the question then is okay. Is that a nice scaffold for
kids to start and then they can kind of produce beyond that and push the boundaries beyond
that? Or are they just going to stay there at that point of just repeating what they see? That I
think is just an open question. Yes?
>>: In your presentation you didn't distinguish about gender. I am wondering if there is in any
of these topics that you have investigated was there any significant difference?
>> Katie Davis: With art we didn't see.
>>: Could you repeat the question?
>> Katie Davis: Sure. I didn't say anything about gender and differences between boys and girls
that we saw. With respect to the creative productions, we did not see any noticeable
differences. We did have gender data. We also did have age data and we didn't really see any
differences there. I didn't actually talk at all about one of the other focuses of my research
which is bullying and not just bullying but kind of hate speech and teasing and stuff. In my
conversations with teens, it's definitely the girls who talk about that the most. And then the
boys who are saying oh. That's what girls do. They get into all these fights online and things
like that. They may not call it bullying, but the younger kids do call it bullying, age 10 and 11,
but the older ones don't. There I did see a difference. With identity exploration, girls -- there
was both. Both boys and girls were open to going online to explore different identities, but
actually I think this is probably -- what stood out to me as the biggest difference was actually in
the interview process itself. If you look at the interview transcripts with the girls, it's much,
much longer than the interview transcripts with the boys. They just didn't say as much. But
there was still, you know, they still are both using these technologies to connect with other
people. I think the intensity of those personal text messages and IMs between friends, that
kind of seems to peak in early adolescence among girls in particular and that is very much
reflective of developmental literature because it shows that in early teenage years, particularly
with girls, there's a lot of self divulgence and really trying to explore who you are in the context
of your close friendships. Yes?
>>: I'm from a teacher perspective. I'm kind of curious about what you think about skill
development because when we first heard about calculators, which was really the first app,
right? About not being able to add and subtract and I don't know if you saw recently, Microsoft
and Skype about foreign language now, if Skype can speak Italian for me or German, then why
learn German? From a teaching perspective, how about the skill development? How is it going
to impact skill development?
>> Katie Davis: Those two examples, I think, are so interesting and I have a different response
to those too. If you think about calculators, I would say, and with learning statistics as well,
should you do, some professors still think you should do the math longhand. Some say that's
just slow you down from doing the answer and the really interesting questions. I take that
approach to calculators and things like that. You know, let that free you up and use those two
free you up so that you can answer big meteor questions. But when it comes to learning a
language, if you're going -- I thought a lot about it. I have a PhD student who's going to be
doing some research soon on the experience of traveling now. You actually can get by just fine
not learning the language because you have an app to help you translate the language. I
remember spending my year abroad in France and just feeling completely lost, but then getting
over it and, you know, learning the language. I would hate to see that be lost and I think that
there is definitely merit in getting into the zone of being uncomfortable. Actually, it reminds
me of something that Howard and I were so shocked by. We had a series of conversations with
my sister Molly and she was 17 at the time and in these conversations we talked about our own
histories growing up with the technologies of our time. It came to light that Molly had never
been lost before and both Howard and I have experienced very vivid memories of being lost. I
remember being lost trying to find my mother in the Long Island Railroad station and just not
knowing what to do and just having to figure it out and draw my own resources. Whereas,
Molly has never had that experience. Now she probably will one day when her phone, like
when the battery dies or something [laughter]. And I had that experience last week. My
phone, the battery died, but I just think it's such an interesting thing to think of. Yes?
>>: You've gone on the theme of app enablement versus app, I would even go so far as to say
app disablement. Speaking to an audience like this, you know, who's involved with technology
production of technology et cetera, what can this audience keep in mind and what is the
movement, if you will, or the horror, the direction towards helping Oscar not be swept along by
his peers or what he sees or the influences he has and steer him in that direction so he's not, so
he can act on his intuitiveness that maybe I need to put the toys away, or the technology away
sometimes myself. What do we do to promote that?
>> Katie Davis: It's interesting. It makes me think. I'm not sure if you saw the same article that
I did recently, but apparently, parents in Silicon Valley more than any other areas send their
kids to Waldorf schools where there's no technology at all. I think that's really interesting and
kind of telling. It also suggests that there is a recognition that there needs to be some sort of
balance and I would say as I mentioned before that modeling is important. With kids, anyone,
parents, family, relatives can model that behavior and provide experiences that use technology
in an open-ended way, but also provide experience that actually has nothing to do with
technology at all. But then when it comes to this particular crowd and designers of technology,
one of my colleagues at the information school, [indiscernible] Friedman, has a concept of value
sensitive design where it's really important to think about human values in the design process
and really take those into account because these technologies, while technology doesn't
determine what we do, it does the interaction between our technology and our social practices
really shapes what we do in important fundamental ways. It's at the design point I think that
it's a really important time to think about that. Yes?
>>: So you said in kind of looking at your research that kind of earlier generations were shaped
more by world events, like World War II and so on and then there's kind of this app generation,
and I was wondering kind of looking at maybe kids who grew up and remember 9/11 happening
and kind of growing up in sort of like this specter of the shadow of terrorism. Did you find any
sort of like that was a shaping event for more kids versus the apps or how they interacted?
>> Katie Davis: It's amazing; it wasn't as much. And now this is not our research. This was
actually research done by Arthur Levine at Princeton and he's done a series of national surveys
of college campuses since the ‘70s, like once every decade. The most recent one, you know,
were the use of now, they were in kindergarten, high schoolers I think who are graduating I
think might have been in kindergarten at 9/11. And so college kids have vivid memories of this,
but what stands out to them when they're asked what has been the most significant change in
your lifetime or event, not change, but event. More of them say technology. And actually
there was just a small survey that some reporters at the Kitsap, I think it's Tribune. I'm not
sure. It's a newspaper. They called me last week because they told me that they had done this
survey of the graduating seniors at the high school and they also had said that the biggest event
of their lifetime was the invention of the smart phone. And they asked them about 9/11 and all
these things and that was important and the capturing of Osama bin Laden was very important,
but there was no one thing that such a large proportion of them kind of focused in on as
important as the smart phone, which is amazing. I don't know. Will they still think that we
when they're in their 30s in their 40s, maybe that'll change. But yeah, it's not just us
characterizing them in terms of technology; it's them as well. Yes?
>>: Do you think there is an opportunity to create a campground for people to get away from
apps?
>> Katie Davis: Like camp?
>>: Like campground, like you're away from highways and infrastructure, running water,
electricity.
>> Katie Davis: Yeah, as long as the parents don't send their kids with two cell phones.
[laughter].
>>: But this is for grown-ups.
>> Katie Davis: Yeah, well. I think, I have friends who think about where they go on vacation
now based on where there is no cell phone coverage. You know, I actually love it. I have family
in Canada and I don't make any effort to get, to extend my cell phone plan when I'm in Canada.
I just say, okay. It's off. There are people who are creating those spaces for themselves and
kids as well. When I talk to youth they are really ambivalent about technology. They can't
imagine, probably like us now, can't imagine life without it, but they do definitely recognize just
the pressure of always feeling they have to be responding to their friends and always reachable
especially during adolescence when, you know, your peer group is just, that's where you're
developing. It's just so important and if you're not in it and if you're not reachable, that can
have dire social consequences for you. But I do think that youth, you know, I see pockets of
friends saying okay. We're going to take a Facebook fast or something like that. We're just
going to cut out and we are just going to be around each other and I think that those kinds of
self corrections are great.
>>: My question, again, [indiscernible] monetization, just as REI monetized people’s need to go
to camps, is there a way to monetize people's need to go away from technology?
>> Katie Davis: I'm sure there is and I'm sure there are people who are -- I bet that on websites
for, you know, rural, wilderness type vacations, they probably feature that. Detached, cut the
cord from your technology. Yes?
>>: With your research in showing boys and girls all using technology, we've seen the decrease,
unfortunately, of girls going into stem related fields. Any insight into how we could ignite that
with the young girls?
>> Katie Davis: Actually, there was just, this was just featured research from University of
Washington yesterday, I think on NPR or KUW about one of the big challenges here is the social
norms around computer programming and the perception that this researcher found of
women, this perception that it's the geeky guys who are computer programmers. And they
don't see themselves in that at all. One of my areas focus is identity development and since
this research I'm focusing particularly on identity development in the context of education.
How is it that young people come to see themselves as computer programmers versus writers
versus whatever, actors? And it starts really early and I think that the interventions need to
happen at many different stages and it needs to start early at elementary school and even
before that. Unfortunately, if you think about what schools are responsible for testing, it's not
computer programming. It's not computational thinking. It's English, language, arts and math
which clearly are very important, but the common core doesn't have computer programming.
Hopefully, that can change in the future, but I think it's really important. And then all the way
through that and then just changing social norms. Yes?
>>: You looked at app enabling and app dependence. You looked at kids preferences towards
one or the other. Did you see a certain side of app use for the kids that were gravitating
towards one versus the other, or did you really see a difference?
>> Katie Davis: I think Howard and I might have slightly different answers for that. He tends to
be more of a pessimist and he saw app dependence in a lot more places than I felt that it was
present. But I think that there, I think a lot of youth are -- but I don't think it's the majority, are
very good at moderating themselves. I think most youth are kind of somewhere in the middle
were some days they are tilting more towards dependence, some more towards enablement.
But I think there are a smaller group that, and if there wasn't this technology they would be
having a rough time anyway connecting with people, figuring out who they are and they're the
ones who, they tend to get themselves down in a hole where they are just so, they get really
into one thing online and it almost, they can't detach from that. And it's by no means the
majority. And actually, I think that's why it's important to really flesh out and figure out which
kids are and are not showing these signs and which kids are doing great and under what
circumstances and being a little bit more specific on them. All kids are doing this or all kids are
doing that.
>> Jacqueline Bouchier: One more question.
>> Katie Davis: Okay. Yes?
>>: I wanted to follow-up on your comments on cyber bullying, in particular. I'm wondering if
you have any data about the ubiquity of the device creates sort of a lack of a safe haven for
cyber bullying and how you experienced that and then tangentially to that how you
experienced sort of premature exposure to graphic violence or adult content or any of the
other sort of darker parts of the app world.
>> Katie Davis: With the cyber bullying, so that constant always being connected to your
device, that really does -- and there's a fine line between bullying and then just always
communicating with your friends. That in itself can feel kind of suffocating even when there's
no bullying going on, just the feeling that you always have to be answering either your
boyfriend or your girlfriend or your best friend. But then the real bullying, when that happens
24-7, that can really, I mean just off-line bullying is hard enough, but at least there's, it happens
and then it stops and then it may happen again, but at least sometimes you can have a space
away from that. In one of my larger quantitative studies I looked at some predictors of cyber
bullying and one of them was the amount of time that kids spend on their in cell phones, the
amount of time they spend on Facebook. This was in 2010, so Facebook was still very popular.
Those were predictors of experiences of bullying. Although I didn't call it bullying because that
doesn't really resonate with teens. I was very specific about specific experiences they had
online. On the more hopeful side, some buffers, so things that would predict a decrease in
bullying in that study were actually things that we might control. Things like kids who had
closer relationships to either their mother or their father were less likely to experience cyber
bullying. Also, the biggest predictor was kids who felt like they had at least one person at
school who they could trust and they had positive experiences. Usually like an adult at school
and just good experiences at school really seem to be a buffer against bullying. I think it really
does suggest that there is a place for adults to really have a positive effect and support kids. I
think sometimes adults and teachers and parents, those are the ones that I speak with the
most, feel like the kids know way more than I do, so why should I, I have nothing to give them. I
have nothing to add. But they do. They have, they may not know as much, often they do
though. But even if they don't know as much technically, they still have, you know, a lot of life
experience to impart and just emotional support to give and I think that's very important. And
your second part had to do with the violent content and the adult content. That's less of my
focus, but it's definitely, I think that's a real concern and I think there's a real tension there
between wanting to protect kids, especially younger kids. I think once you start to get into the
mid-teen years and above they can mostly handle it. Although, what does concern me is, you
know, how women are treated sometimes online and the misogyny that you can see online and
online porn and things like that and what messages that sends to young boys about what is
okay and how it's okay to interact and treat women. That is concerning to me, but I haven't
looked at it specifically. But with younger kids I think they don't really know how to interpret
that. They interpret the world very concretely and so it's very confusing. But I do think there's
a tension between wanting to protect kids from that on the one hand and then blocking
everything and blocking their access to a lot of really rich experiences online. Also, issues of
trust, if your parent is monitoring you 24-7 and looking at your phone log and things like that,
that's hard to develop and maintain trust in that situation. I think it's a really tricky area for
parents to navigate and I don't think -- we're all trying to figure it out right now, unfortunately.
>> Jacqueline Bouchier: Katie, thank you so much for coming.
>> Katie Davis: Thank you so much for having me. [applause]